It's Sort Of Bullshit How Little Respect Trae Young Still Gets When Talking About The Best Guards In The NBA
Nathaniel S. Butler. Getty Images.
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Last night Trae Young went back into his second home, you may know it as Madison Square Garden, and had himself quite a performance in the 117-111 Hawks win. It was a nice and much needed win for a Hawks team that is technically still alive for the 8th seed of the play in (2 games back) and by now I think we can all agree that Trae going into MSG turns him into one of the best villains we have in the game today
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Must be nice to have two homecourts as a player, that's pretty rare. Now I don't want to step on any blogging toes here and I know Big Tennessee is the Hawks guy, but I feel like what I'm about to talk about would get dismissed immediately if he blogged it. Commenters would just call him a delusional homer blah blah blah and miss the point of what he's saying. Trust me, I know that life. So I hope it's OK that I'm writing this because after watching this latest Trae Young performance I started to think about something that has definitely been said before, but is even more true to this day.
Trae Young is wildly disrespected as a basketball player and frankly, it's bullshit.
I think it was when I saw that first Statmuse tweet last night that I suddenly found myself going down this weird Trae Young rabbit hole. I feel confident in saying that I am as impartial as it gets when it comes to Trae. As a Celtics guy, I should hate him. I should slander him. But I honestly can't really understand what's going on. Let me lay it all out for you.
This is a snapshot of Trae Young's production to start his career
In that picture, there are zero All NBA seasons. Not a single team in any of the years. That's feels pretty wrong. I started to think about how in 20 years history probably won't remember Trae Young for how good he truly was, simply because he for some reason keeps getting boned when it comes to this stuff. For most players in the league, if they come off a playoff run like Trae had in 2021, where you could make the case they make the NBA Finals had he not gotten hurt, and then they back it up with 28.2/3.8/9.5 on 45/38% with 3.0 3PM a night, they are usually stamped and certified. They are pretty much a shoe in for All NBA. Happens all the time.
Yet this season it's pretty damn likely that Trae will once again be snubbed and overlooked. You're telling me a 29.6/9.3 season in 2019-20 isn't All NBA worthy? That's insane to me. But back to this season. Guess how many players are averaging at least 28.2/3.8/9.5 on the season at the point guard position?
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Trae Young. That's it.
That's the entire list in the whole league. You hear a lot about how stacked that position is this year, well I don't see 6 other players putting up that sort of production. Let's look at this another way
This is Luka. A no doubt about it, surefire First Team All NBA player this year. If you can't agree with that I dunno what to tell you. Luka is that dude. So I see how Trae compares to that this year and I'm to believe he's not worthy of any All NBA spot? He's producing at a very similar level to someone who is a lock for First Team All NBA. But if you look around the internet/listen to podcasts/etc about All NBA at the guard spot, you hear these names: Luka, Steph, Ja, CP3, DeRozan, Mitchell, Booker etc.
My question is, how is Trae Young never even mentioned?
In my opinion, there are a few reasons. Some people will point to his record. At 36-36 maybe you don't feel like that's All NBA worthy. It cost Jayson Tatum last year when his team went .500 so I get it. Here's my issue with that though. How can record matter for Trae, but then you see LeBron be put on First or Second Team All NBA? His team is 10 GAMES under .500 and might miss the playoffs entirely. For him, the record doesn't matter but the individual stats do. What if the Bulls fall into the play in? Nobody is talking about how that might negatively impact DeRozan because of what he's done individually this year. But for Trae, his individual stats don't matter and his record does? How does that make sense.
The second reason you'll probably hear is Trae's defense. It stinks. Like, worst in the league bad. I can understand why that might keep him off some people's teams. But once again, here's the problem with that. I experienced the 2016-17 Isaiah Thomas Second Team All NBA season. I can assure you nobody called him even a decent defender at that time. He had the same worst in the league label, yet made Second Team and was top 5 in MVP. I've also seen Damian Lillard make a few All NBA's in his day, so you can't tell me that every guard that makes All NBA is always a good defender. That's just not true, yet for Young he gets penalized for it.
For me, All NBA should be about which 15 players had the best individual seasons that year. The main issue though is the lines get blurred and the criteria changes pretty much every year. Some years with some players, it's about team success. Hello Julius Randle. For others it doesn't matter about the team success and just how they produced. Hello 2022 LeBron. The fact that there is no clear cut criteria for this is how someone like Trae keeps getting boned.
I know it feels maybe a little played out or ridiculous to say Trae Young is underrated or underappreciated, but once I really started to look into this last night I can't come to any other conclusion. You can't even say Trae is just a regular season player either. We all saw what he did in his first playoff appearance. I think with all this stuff if you want to talk about being an elite player or an All NBA caliber player, you have to do All NBA caliber shit. That is what Trae is doing. Everyone else that has had similar moments this year are names you hear as locks for All NBA. Trae is most likely going to get left off completely and that just doesn't sit right with me as a nonbiased observer who just appreciates incredible basketball.
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Does he just have to wait his turn and for some older guards like CP3 to retire? Maybe, but again that's bullshit. I'm not even totally sure you could say someone like Steph has had a better 2022 season than Trae, he just plays on the better team and thus is a lock.
So for any Hawks stoolies out there, I had to write this blog for you. At least someone should say it because I know that if a player on my favorite team was putting up these types of NBA seasons and kept getting overlooked, it would drive me insane. What we're seeing is basically this all over again